Comment by torginus
13 hours ago
What does Meta even want with AI?
I suppose they could solve superintelligence and cure cancer and build fusion reactors with it, but that's 100% outside their comfort zone - if they manage to build synthethic conversation partners and synthethic content generators as good or better than the real thing the value of having every other human on the planet registered to one of their social network goes to zero.
Which is impossible anyway - I facebook to maintain real human connections and keep up with people who I care about, not to consume infinite content.
At 1.6T market cap it's very hard to 10x or greater the company anymore doing what's in their comfort zone and they've got a lot of money to play with to find easier to grow opportunities. If Zuckerberg was convinced he could do that by selling toothpicks they'd have a go at the toothpick business. They went after the "metaverse" first, then AI. Both are just very fast growth options which happen to be tech focused because that's the only way you generate new comparable value as a company (unless you're sitting on a lot of state owned oil) in the current markets.
You missed an opportunity to use paperclips instead of toothpicks, as your example.
Would be very inline with the AI angle.
they are out for your clicks and attention minutes
if OpenAI can build a "social" network of completely generated content, that can kill Meta. Even today I venture to guess that most of the engagements in their platforms is not driven by real friends, so an AI driven platform won't be too different, or it might make content generation be so easy as to make your friends engage again.
Apart from it the ludicrous vision of the metaverse seems much more plausible with highly realistic world models
How do LLMs help with clicks and attention minutes? Why do they spend $100+B a year in AI capex, more than Google and Microsoft that actually rent AI compute to clients? What are they going to do with all that compute? It’s all so confusing
Browse TikTok and you already see AI generated videos popping up. Could well be that the platforms with the most captivating content will not be a "social" network but one consisting of some tailor made feed for you. That could undermine the business model of the existing social networks - unless they just fill it with AI generated content themselves. In other words: Facebook should really invest in good video generating models to keep their platforms ahead.
It might be just me, but in my opinion facebook platforms are way past the "content from your friends phase", but is full of cheap peddled viral content.
If that content becomes even cheaper, of higher quality and highly tailored to you, that is probably worth a lot of money, or at least worth not losing your entire company by a new competitor
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Sad to hear it has come to attention minutes, used to be seconds.